Boustany slams IRS for parody video

A senior House Republican is questioning the Internal Revenue Service’s judgment for spending nearly $10,000 on a training video parodying Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” for a conference.

Rep. Charles Boustany, who chairs the House Ways and Means subcommittee tasked with IRS oversight, released the video — which includes cringe-worthy wigs and dramatic dialogue — on Friday and said it is another example of the agency “abuse and waste.”

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“Months ago, I demanded the IRS come clean about the time and money it spent to produce these frivolous videos. While we may have no answers, we do have an endless supply of what appears to be the IRS’s idea of entertainment,” the Louisiana Republican said.

The IRS has come under scrutiny this year for a series of training videos — including a Star Trek spoof that cost nearly $60,000 — that were often used as entertainment for conferences. The Apprentice-style video was used as the opening video for a 2011 Small Business/Self-Employed Division Conference.

The agency also sent a second video to the committee that showed a tour of the IRS production studio. Boustany didn’t criticize that video.

The IRS said is a statement that the videos “would not be produced under tough new IRS standards and guidelines.”

“It is important to note these two videos from 2010 and 2011 are among more than 2,300 videos the IRS has produced for taxpayer education and employee training purposes since 2010,” the statement said.

An IRS spokesperson told POLITICO that the video was just made available to the Ways and Means Committee because the agency had just finished its review of all training videos.